The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  “I remember when they had faces,” he said.

  “I wish I did,” replied Muni, beyond consolation. He put on his estranged clothing and led little Tyrone down the stairs through the largely liquidated store, then out onto the raised sidewalk above the canal that no longer deserved its name.

  Vacant now of vessels except a foundered few, the grand canal of North Main Street was mostly dried up, the once steely blue body of water having separated into standing pools. The dregs of the lagoon were exposed: spittoons and smashed hogsheads, the legs of a supine piano protruding like a belly-up beast from the shallow residue. The air was no longer as tonic as it had been in Muni’s written version, where the atmosphere partook of the bracing climate on the first day of creation. The street was not quite the street of his composition, which had renewed itself daily, so that every morning you had to reacquaint yourself with the drama of your surroundings: the melancholy of the Floradora girl in the ad painted on the wall of Grinspan’s Cigar Store, the grace adhering to the wrought iron volutes of tailor Bluestein’s sewing machine … The dilapidated storefronts had lost their look of scenery suspended from a rigging in heaven and appeared as if about to collapse. The sidewalks were barren of people, giving the impression that the never-ending festivities that had so absorbed Muni Pinsker in his role as chronicler were finally over.

  But the festivities, as the boy and his unkempt cousin discovered, had merely moved west to Market Square Park, which was where Muni had been headed in the first place. It was his duty to his aunt and uncle and their surviving offspring to consign the dust of Katie and Pinchas Pin to the hole in the park, the one with no bottom in which the great oak was upended. That way their remains might follow where Muni assumed their spirits had led. He never questioned the sense of this conviction; in his logy and discomposed state it was the only logic the former scribe felt he had a hold of, though it also soothed him somewhat to hold on to the hand of the unquestioning little boy.

  Entering the park, they encountered the gathered tribe of North Main Street, assembled as they’d been on that night—yesterday and long ago—when the earth had spasmed and split its seams. This evening they were joined, however, by a crush of strangers. Some were dusty farm families from the open market in the wagonyard off Commerce Avenue, others from the town in their Sunday best, a few brandishing torches though it wasn’t yet dark. Muni was surprised to see that his neighbors mingled so freely with the outsiders, who had kept their distance from the Pinch since the quake. The general mood seemed to extend the holiday attitude that had prevailed throughout the pages of his chronicle, though his co-religionists looked to have relaxed their exultatation, tempered now to a bland expectancy. While some were still costumed in vestiges of fancy dress—the Widow Teitelbaum in her harem pants, Eddie Kid Wolf in his samite robe—most wore their typically drab, out-of-fashion apparel. The children toddled about willy-nilly, their expressions suggesting they’d just waked up from a vivid dream they were trying without success to recall.

  Muni was greeted with a cordiality that gave no hint of his long seclusion. Mr. Elster chucked Tyrone under the chin with an arthritic hand, while his dumpling wife exclaimed a bit cryptically, “Every child brings its own luck.” Others remarked with admiration how the boy had grown. The bruiser Kid Wolf snatched him up and set him astride his thick shoulders for a better view of whatever it was the crowd had gathered to see. Tyrone went wide-eyed at the sudden separation from his cousin but soon enough became acclimated to his elevated seat. He was further calmed, it seemed, by the grin he received from the stunted grotesque seated next to him on the stooped shoulders of Morris Padauer. Muni had to stand on tiptoe to look past the wintry garb (though the season was unequivocably spring) of a cluster of Shpinker Hasids for a glimpse of the spectacle, if spectacle there was. He noted with interest that in the midst of the fanatics, looking decidedly refreshed from his underworld sabbatical, stood their sable-trimmed rebbe, Eliakum ben Yahya. What Muni saw beyond them, beneath the roots that had replaced the broad boughs of the inverted oak, made him tighten the fist that gripped his aunt and uncle’s crumbled remains.

  For next to the pit, out of which sprouted the roots like Hydras’ heads, was a cedar-staved nail keg, and on the keg stood a hatless black man, his wrinkled dome wreathed in a horseshoe of gray wool. His pants bagged around his spare shanks, and his homespun shirt was buttoned to the throat. His smoked lenses had been removed, so it was hard to tell in the failing light whether his eyes were sunk in their hollows or simply not there. Had his hands not been tied behind his back, he might have serenaded the crowd on the fiddle that someone had hung about his neck by one of its broken strings. Around that same wattled throat there dangled a noose. The rope extended from the Negro’s neck straight up into the leafless tangle then downward again at an incline, its tasseled end resting in the hands of a man in a hood like a dented dunce cap and a white linen robe. The man, his beefy face unvisored and flushed with the pride of his office, resembled a jolly monk about to ring a bell. That’s when Muni noticed that other cowled figures, a few of them holding rifles, were interspersed throughout the gathering.

  Between the bell ringer and the nail keg stood another man whose white robe boasted the insignia that identified him as a figure of some rank in the Knights of the White Kamelia. This one, his badger face also exposed, cleared his throat as if tuning an instrument.

  “Ghouls and goblins of the Invisible Empire,” he bellowed, “Anglo-Saxon brethren and sistern of our hallowed Dixie, we are gathered here this evenin’—”

  “This ain’t no weddin’, Lawyer Poteet!” shouted a voice from the crowd, provoking laughter. Others chimed in to the effect that he should can the speechifying and get on with the main event, but the speaker would have his moment.

  “To avenge the evil wrought on our citizens by these ape-like creatures of jungle darkness”—Asbestos turned his head toward Lawyer Poteet as if he hadn’t quite caught the gist—“and make a example of the vile species that would defy our laws and miscegenate,” tasting the word, “with our women.”

  There was more laughter, since it was obvious to the audience that, had it ever been the case, the old Negro’s miscegenating days were long over. Some of the assembled yawned demonstratively; a bonneted woman distributed sandwiches and soda pop to her family from a hamper. Then Muni was suddenly moved to ask himself what day it was: for he had the marked impression that this evening—against whose chartreuse sky the park was thrown into stark relief—was fixed to a particular calendar date: rather than containing other days, this one had the distinct character of a Friday evening, when all good Hebrews should be in shul.

  The Grand Syklops of the Memphis Klavern continued reciting the laundry list of crimes against nature that the nigra was guilty of, though there was no mention of Asbestos’s specific offense. At one point, spurring his hobbyhorse onward, Lawyer Poteet strayed into territory clearly intended for the ears of Muni Pinsker and his kind, declaring that Caucasians were the true Israelites (you could read it in the Bible) and America the prophesied site of the regathering of the tribes. The Jews themselves (again quoting scripture) were a mongrel breed, “satanic, poisonous, and parasitic.”

  His neighbors shifted apprehensively, while Muni came only by degrees to understand what was happening. It had been a rocky passage back from the story he was writing to the one he was living, despite their being in theory one and the same. How, he wondered, had these interlopers come to invade the sovereign precinct of the Pinch? (The interlopers seemed to be asking the same thing with regard to the Jews.) Were such lumpen bumpkins as these really capable of pulling off any authentic mischief? Surely Boss Crump’s hirelings would appear on the scene in time to break up the mob and put an end to their shenanigans (though Mr. Crump’s handpicked high sheriff, Longwillie Tatum, could be seen mingling among the robes in a sheet of his own). Maybe it wasn’t too late for the scribe to hasten back to his room and devise a different course of events, but the
prospect of writing anything at all now seemed beyond his powers, and besides, like everyone else Muni was glued to the spot.

  That Lawyer Poteet’s general vitriol had descended into ad hominem abuse (“This’n’s proof skunks fuck monkeys, pardon my French …”) implied that his speech was winding down, and a hush fell over the crowd. The bound Negro, who had seemed almost incidental to the proceedings, was now the focus of everyone’s rapt attention. In the twilight the torches flared more brightly, prompting Muni to remember a phrase: auto-da-fé. So maybe Asbestos would prove as good as his name. But a nod from the Grand Syklops to his henchman reminded Muni that fire was not the chosen method of execution; this was a lynching pure and simple, a time-honored tradition of these peculiar southern states. And the locus they’d selected for the event was a sure way of demonstrating that the ghetto had lost its inviolability. The blind musician cocked his frosty head this way and that, presumably from the discomfort of the rope. Or was he listening for unheard melodies?

  “God bless y’all white folks,” he murmured, his scratchy voice, though just above a whisper, still carrying in the silent dusk. “You done climbed the ugly ladder and never miss a rung.”

  It was then that the girl in her sequined leotard flashing the last rays of the setting sun began to slide headfirst down the thick rope.

  She had thought of him often during the jumps from show town to show town, had always missed his spooky music; none of the windjammers had ever adjusted their rhythms to suit so well her aerial turns. Lately she’d missed the old-timer like she missed the river itself and wondered why his fiddle couldn’t be added to the brass jig band that played the sideshow. She imagined him taking his place alongside the ensemble of darky musicians, such as Calliope Clarence, who played his Apollonicon with a sickle grin. The blind fiddler could play in the band and double-stage as a bumbling auguste, like the whiteface Negro clowns who were as thoroughly assimilated into the circus community as the freaks.

  She knew that back in Memphis his days were numbered: he’d been marked (and marked again) for blue ruin since the time of his maiming on the north Mississippi plantation where he was born into bondage. He’d told her the tale: how he had the misfortune to stumble upon the overseer involved in an unspeakable act in the corn crib. “I ain’t seen nothing!” he protested to the cap’n, who assured him that nothing was what he would see from then on, and straightaway proceeded to gouge out his eyes with a penknife. The master, enraged at this wanton destruction of his property, dismissed the overseer and thereafter made of the blind pickaninny a house pet, awarding him—when he’d observed him admiring it with grazing fingers—the gift of a spruce trade violin. Demonstrating an innate aptitude for the instrument, the boy expressed his gratitude by taking to the open road with his gift, only to be returned in chains soon after by patrollers. The overseer, rehired for his redoubtable efficiency, flogged the boy and salted his wounds in a bath of brine. Unable to relieve the pain that inflamed his back, the blind boy displaced it by stroking the wounds and welts of others, thereby touching nerves whose oscillating vibrations he translated to the strings of his fiddle.

  The next time he ran away he was put in stocks, and the time after that branded with an iron, during which procedure his refusal to cry out earned him the honorific that stuck. After his fifth or sixth attempt at escape it was noticed, when the serial fugitive was stripped for punishment, that he’d begun to mature—an observation that inspired the cap’n, always handy with his blade, to geld him on the spot. A generation or two later, when the blind man came to guide other fugitives through the tunnels that the old bayous were converted into after the fever, it was said he stuffed nugget-sized stones into the hollows of his eyes; legend had it that the stones allowed him to see in the dark. But the cops who finally apprehended him at his illicit business, and the mob that wrested him from the hands of the cops, aware of the rumor, never recovered any such stones.

  If Jenny were honest, she would have had to admit that her reasons for wanting to retrieve the fiddler from his station in the Pinch were mainly selfish; her motives had more to do with missing the company of his eerie music than securing his safety. Then, too, the dreams that had saddled her with an unwieldy ballast on the wire caused her to teeter precariously in the direction of her old hometown. None of which excluded the providence of her arrival at the eleventh hour, when she stole into the roots of the tree in the park and did what came naturally: peeling off her garments to the costume beneath and lowering herself headfirst down the rope, she began to spin.

  She performed a series of one-arm planges, looping her hand in the rope and flinging her body up and over her shoulder as if throwing herself repeatedly into a sack of air. She executed cunning jackknifes and dislocations, rolled herself up into a ball, hung by her ankles and knees. As she caracoled above the crowd, the rope swayed and the noose twirled like a lasso about the Negro’s neck until it was lifted clear off over his head—though, riveted as they were by the acrobat, no one seemed to notice. Some of the assembled held their breath while Jenny gyrated in circles; others, such as Muni Pinsker, could not have drawn a breath if they tried. In fact, so staggered was the retired scribe by battling emotions that he was on the point of passing out; he had to pound his chest with the heel of his empty right hand, as in the prayer of repentence, to coax his lungs into filling again. Then the pain of his breathing brought hot tears to his eyes. What did the girl intend with her unscripted exhibition? he wondered. Did she mean to beguile the crowd until the condemned man could be spirited away? If that was the case, she had badly miscalculated, because the spectators were so spellbound by her performance that no one—even had they been so inclined—stepped forward to rescue Asbestos, who remained standing patiently atop his nail keg, his face upturned despite his sightless eyes.

  The merest meniscus of a moon had appeared in the lapis sky, prompting the Hasids among them to begin mumbling the Rosh Chodesh blessing. The sequins on Jenny’s costume, catching moonlight, seemed to throw sparks, which a few of the fanatics tried to snatch out of the air. Between their antics and those of the girl on the rope, most of the spectators missed the rueful blue chord soughed by a breeze on the remaining strings of Asbestos’s fiddle. But the chord was apparently loud enough to snap the Grand Syklops’s attention back to the task at hand. He bade his fellows hoist him to a height from which he could replace the noose around the fiddler’s unresisting neck. Lowered again after tightening the knot, Lawyer Poteet gave the nod to his henchman—“Klaliff Peay!”—who yanked the rope taut and tied it off on a nearby hydrant. The minstrel’s stick legs appeared to execute a two-step in the air above the keg that the klansmen had kicked over; then, only inches from the ground, the legs grew still. Transfixed, Muni Pinsker was unaware that his clenched fist had opened and the dust of his aunt and uncle—at least that which hadn’t already been trodden underfoot—was dispersed by the mild evening breeze.

  16

  Hostage to Destiny

  The day was bright and the blades of the ceiling fan stirred the cool spring air in the shop, raising the dust in miniature twisters about the floorboards. The radio announced that Senator Eugene McCarthy had defeated LBJ in the New Hampshire primary; Walter Cronkite was urging negotiations to end the war; and I had been gloriously seduced. So why did I feel like I was in helpless freefall? Because, if I wasn’t Rachel’s lover anymore, then what was I? “Gornisht!” I proclaimed aloud. I’m nothing—and heard my old boss remarking, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.” Where was his therapeutic abuse when I needed it?

  Not that I couldn’t get along on my own. I had my resources, didn’t I? My memories, though they seemed these days to have dead-ended around the time I came across Muni’s book. Since then I’d done such a good job of covering my tracks that I’d almost managed to hide them from myself. This was of course only a temporary amnesia, the lingering effects of a period of wretched excess; it would pass. Then I remembered how the population of the Pinch—after the tree
in Market Square Park had been hauled off for cordwood and the crater filled with tons of gravel from a convoy of dump trucks—how they seemed to have jointly misplaced the past. One morning they looked around and the world was no better than it should be: the neighborhood was a slum, its primary thoroughfare strewn with drenched unmentionables and broken furniture (and perhaps a drowned hippogriff). They shared a universal hangover that felt as if it might last the rest of their days. Like me, they’d become marooned in the present.

  Muni’s book lay on the desk in front of me, looking as nondescript as ever, though the hard reading I’d subjected it to had given the binding some character. I recalled the first time I’d opened it to that random passage—somewhere toward the middle or was it the end of the book?—when Lenny Sklarew makes his shambling entrance into the chronicle. So far I’d steered clear of that chapter, not wanting to encounter some fate incompatible with the one I might choose for myself, assuming I had a choice in the matter. Now, however, I wondered what the text could reveal beyond an account of Lenny opening a book to read about a moment when Lenny opens a book. Like Moses receiving the Torah in which he reads the story of Moses receiving the Torah, world without end … (“Look who thinks he’s Moses.”)

  I opened The Pinch to where I’d left off the night before, at the part where the trucks came and went from the park and the merchants of North Main Street began again to contact wholesalers and contractors beyond their neighborhood. I read that another artesian well had been located in a sand aquifer by means of a water witch in Orange Mound, that the Reverend Billy Sunday accompanied Sheriff Hoss Tatum, Longwillie’s cretinous son, on a “still” raid in the Loosahatchie Bottoms. Machine Gun Kelly was captured in his skivvies in a bungalow on Rayner Street, and Lenny Sklarew …